Every year, Dahlia Adler lists prompts on Instagram for writers to share about themselves, their work, and their life. I’ve been tempted to see what made the platform so popular, so this event was a good opportunity.

Aspiration is “a hope or ambition of achieving something,” such as we see with the #RelationshipGoals tags on social media. Not surprisingly, our hopes and goals are sometimes reflected in the stories we write or the books we read.

Last week, we talked about discovering the essence of our character, but what about the essence of our story. What makes a story idea the one we want to tell? And why does understanding our story’s essence matter?

Longer writing—such as stories—can often be easier to write than something shorter, like a synopsis, query, Twitter pitch, or log line. That’s why the skills important in poetry can strengthen our prose writing.

Just as we have go-to favorite authors that we know we can depend on for delivering a certain type of story, readers are evaluating us for what we can deliver: What’s our promise to readers when they pick up one of our stories?

Part of being an author is finding and marketing our book to readers who will love our story. If we think like a business person, we can see how the launching of a new book has many similarities to how businesses launch a new product.

We often have more ideas for stories than we actually write, and somehow, we choose and prioritize. Why might we not write a story idea that we’re passionate about—and is there anything we can do to overcome those reasons?

We need to promote our books, as they don’t sell themselves, but most writers avoid thinking about marketing stuff. Yet with the right goals, marketing and promotion can be fun, and Christina Delay is here to show us how.

Instagram is a fast-growing social media platform, but as authors who focus on words rather than pictures, we might not know how to make it work for us. In Part 2, Monica Corwin shares how to make it work for our brand.